


The Torturer's Horse Scratches Its Innocent Behind

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Anal Sex, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dubiously Consensual Bondage, Flogging, Genocide, M/M, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, Prodding, Suspension, The Valiant (Doctor Who), The Year That Never Was (Doctor Who), and helplessness, and humans in danger, and humans traumatised, and the Master is tormenting the Doctor, and there are human spectators, dubiously consensual Lucy, exhibitionistically, it's about collaboration and complicity, it's the Valiant, oh no Simm is being heinous again, videotape, why are they like this, why did I write this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:01:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25160557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: The Master hangs the Doctor up in the Valiant conference room for everyone to see.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/The Master (Simm), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30
Collections: The Doctor and The Master





	The Torturer's Horse Scratches Its Innocent Behind

They wake that morning to find him suspended above them. 

The sun is coming up on top of clouds through the forward windows, and as it rises it winks in and out behind his spindly limbs. For a minute, he’s a letter Y in a pink-edged shadow; it’s going to hurt when the sun peeks past his stretched-out elbow, but it’s hard not to look. Up here, sunrise doesn’t come with soft compromises, whatever the weather below. Skimming the clouds, every day it’s a little more alien, a kind of metallic morning brightness, they wake up and here they still are, gathering for muster on the conference deck, which today has hanging from its lofty ceiling by his wrists a person old enough to be Methuselah but who looks, right now, more like he cut his teeth on The Magic Roundabout.

This is a fresh tape kind of morning, it’s obvious. The cameraman removes one from the stationery cupboard—grabs an extra, just in case—and frees it from its filmy shrink wrap and its cardboard sleeve. When the tape is in and the machine is checked, there’s no reason, really, not to get the shot lined up. It’s early, still. He’s skipped the canteen, and breakfast. The guards are on night shift, which means they’re tired and lax, and if he can finish setting up before they change over, he can have a sit down in a real chair. He could look out one of the portholes. 

He pivots the camera on its stand, finds his focus. The light’s going to change, but if this is going to be his Haystacks, he’ll have to make it work. _Time Lord, morning effect_. The shallow light slants onto the pitiful body, draping the skin in pale geometries. The sun is cold as it touches the limp feet and the hollow flank and the bruised jaw; it had been a shock to see the clothes come off him, a shock that he hadn’t somehow looked less like a human, naked, after all the unfathomable business with the aging and what with the easy healing and the daily evidence that he didn’t have human needs or exactly human functions. A shock to see him stripped at all, after almost a year in the bedraggled brown suit. 

From this angle, through the camera, in this light, he looks almost like he could have been carved, aged smooth, worn down: wood that seems like skin. The shadows, the ways in which he casts them on himself against the brightness look good, too good, like the art it isn’t; but about suffering they were never wrong...

The cameraman fiddles with the zoom, testing the line of sight. The Master will want footage that reveals every effect and reaction. The Master will want pleasing, and this way, with decent camera work and careful editing, is better. Zoomed in, though, the camera puts paid to the illusion of marble stillness. The surface of the body quivers like a struck drum. He pans up, following along limb and past jutting hip and the cage of bone to the strained shoulder and the bent neck and head. 

His breath catches. The Doctor is looking at him. 

He lifts his face from the viewfinder—reluctantly, God, this is the last thing—to meet the dark eyes. 

Relief comes for the guards. The secretary comes in, the tea trolley. The chosen family, forever present. There are the morning sounds of cups and saucers, spoons, the restrained, polite clatter. There’s the stale, tired coffee smell, clinging, tinged with that sour burning—dark roast, the Master had joked—and cooked grease, and perfume. It’s a day at the office. Early call at the studio. The cameraman’s stomach turns. 

Over at the desk, the secretary shuffles papers, presses the button to start up the laptop. She pauses, waiting for the little sound, staring at the screen he knows is mainly blank. She does this every time. He’d like to know what she sees, if she’s watching the status indicator or if she’s nursing a dream or nightmare of some lost thing. It would help him. Maybe she’s just trying not to look. 

Truth is, they’re all waiting for the little sound; they’re all glancing at the clock. The need to keep heads down wars with the need to know the time down to the second. The LCD is hard to read in the morning glare, the weak backlight giving too little to the eye to know whether segments are on or off. If some of their glances take longer than others, if they look too long, eyes lingering, it isn’t because they’re slow to slide from the sight set high above them.

The door opens; the secretary jumps. Someone always jumps when the Master prances through the door. He’s pleased with himself today, smug and happy and easy on the furniture, relaxed as he looks over the night’s reports, his shoulders loose, his posture, as he leans against a banister, casual, almost friendly. He does nothing to acknowledge what he’s done. 

An hour goes by, more, as the light evens out. In the final edit, this will be a time lapse, and it will be the light that conveys the terrible prolongation. It will be the movement of light across the table, diffused by the glass to the floor, in contrast with the practised lack of movement, static and strained, of the people in the room. The cameraman sees, belatedly, that he should be filming at eye level as well, catching the faces that tilt upward, drawn, when no one else is looking. They wear identical expressions in that inadvertent moment, unguarded, uncertain, shamefaced. Frightened. 

The Doctor never looks at them. His eyes are on the Master. 

It’s a reasonable policy—the Master is the one to watch, a volatile Caligula with a pocketful of fire and a direct line to a lot of nasty friends. But months of close study means the cameraman knows it’s not about protecting himself from the Master’s sudden change of moods, not the way it is for the rest of them. 

There’s a great anger in apprehending just how personal is the thing they are playing out with someone else’s planet between them. 

By the time the day’s paperwork is done, the perverse red briefcase empty, the subtle quiver’s become a noticeable tremor, visible even to the naked eye, almost palpable in the close air. The Master’s dictating his last notes, pacing in front of the secretarial desk with self-conscious self-importance. He reaches out and puts his hand on a shaking foot, holds it steady. He pulls it absently back and forth. A bolt creaks among the girders overhead. 

How does a whole room tense and give the impression that it’s trying not to give itself away? The typing, the cleaning, the standing at attention while pretending to be impassive continue. Up on the bridge, the beeps and murmurs of navigation seem to dare to break off, just for a second. The Master monologues on; the back and forth motion picks up momentum, steel links clanking; the body swings. 

“Please.”

The Master stops, as though he’d only been waiting to be addressed. He holds the foot still, his fingers gentle around the ankle. Residual motion carries up the long body. Chain chatters to itself before settling. The Master strokes the narrow arch of the Doctor’s foot. He beams, the pleasure of it private, though even he couldn’t compel anyone to share in it.

“I have a plan today,” he announces suddenly, “a good plan, a training exercise for a school of Toclafane. I’m going to send them on a timed blitz against a city. It could be any city. Oh, one of the small ones, where people have been hiding, making themselves safe. But...maybe more than one. Yes. I’m going to raze more than one small city. I’ve a special treat, though! And any one of you is eligible.”

He looks into the camera, and the cameraman fights not to buck back from the viewfinder. The Master’s anticipatory satisfaction is an assault. 

“Make the Doctor come, and you can name a city to spare.”

The Doctor groans, the denial as garbled as if he’d been gagged. The Master finally looks up at him. “You _don’t_ want to save ten or twenty thousand humans?”

The Doctor thrashes in his chains in a porpoise kick that’s pained and almost petulant. The Master ducks the wild legs, grabs the feet again, this time by both ankles, and yanks down, hard.

The look on the suffering face doesn’t make it to film, but the shout does, and it’s enough. 

Nobody moves, except the Doctor above them. 

It’d be worth it, the cameraman’s thinking, and not that awful a thing, to give a dispassionate blow job or hand job and save a myriad of lives. He has enough evidence the alien jizz can’t hurt him, in the short term, and the short term, even one more day of it, is what he and those tens of thousands are living for. 

This alien, who doesn’t seem alien enough, would want to save those lives. 

But he’s sure—another certainty born of thousands of hours of study—that this alien is human enough to mind, though he isn’t sure the reasons are exactly a human’s reasons, or most humans’ reasons. 

“Lucy,” the Master says. He holds his hand out for her. She’s usually first in line, is Lucy Saxon. 

He bends down to slip her shoes from her feet, a reverse, perverse Prince Charming on his wedding night. He picks her up and puts her onto the conference table with the deceptive ease of dancers on a stage, as though his relationship with gravity is no more human than anything else about him. 

She moves unsteadily across the glass. Her stockings slide on the pristine surface. 

It’s clear she can’t quite reach, even on her toes, and as she tries, the cameraman watches the Master’s indulgent gaze scan slowly from her face up to the Doctor’s. Sometimes, just sometimes, when the Master looks at the Doctor, it isn’t so different from the way the Doctor looks at him. Those are the long seconds of footage the cameraman makes sure to bin as soon as he can.

Very early in this ordeal, the Master had set up a map of the world on the conference table. He’d littered it with miniature fighter jets and tanks, pushing them about as the Toclafane hordes harried the human armies into their last stands. It had taken a week. Now, he whispers to the secretary, who stiffens. She leaves the conference room, only to return with the plotter rod he’d pillaged from a museum, an extended croupier’s rake she’d used to move the toy formations when the reports had come in, her grip whiter and whiter as the week had ground by. 

He takes it from her and thrusts it up at the Doctor’s crotch. 

The thing is basically a pool cue with a crosspiece of wood stuck on the end of it, prosaic and ridiculous and full of human history, and the Master shoves it around carelessly, manipulating the Doctor’s genitals with it, mashing the bar against his bollocks, pushing it between them and the slug of his penis, pushing up, lifting it, letting it lie heavy on the flat of it when none of this horseplay brings it any closer to Lucy Saxon’s mouth. 

“You have to help them a teensy bit, Doctor,” the Master chides. “You can’t leave everything entirely to the humans. Maybe someone taller? Would you like that? _Jack_ ’s tall enough, handsome G.I. that he is. I’ll have him brought in, give him a little relief, a little R&R. If he doesn't deliver, oh, I'll have him hung up there and flayed.”

The Doctor’s eyes zip around the room, abruptly in a panic, his voice vibrating with it. “Don’t. I can’t. Not like—not—”

“Not what, Doctor? What can’t you do? Help your friend? Help anyone?”

The Doctor’s quiet.

“Go on, spell it out for your audience. They don’t understand.” 

Except the cameraman thinks that he does.

“They need to understand.” The Master forms his mouth into an exaggerated pout that morphs suddenly into threat. “My Toclafane are waiting.”

“...Not...not with a human. I can’t—” the Doctor swallows “—get hard for a human.”

“Then who can you get hard for?”

Again, a reluctant pause. “You. Only you.”

The foolish smile that settles on the Master’s face makes the cameraman wonder if this is really true. 

The Master prods indolently with his stick. “I don’t see it.”

“Touch me,” the Doctor says, his voice darkening so that suddenly the cameraman can’t be sure his desire really isn’t true. “You know I need you to touch me. You know what I’ll do for you, just you. Master.”

The plotter’s rod withdraws. The Master swallows. What strange vulnerability is now bare in his eyes. He sways toward the edge of the table. 

“Or are you afraid to test it?”

Fury storms the mercurial face. The Master flips the rod around, draws his shoulder back, and strikes the Doctor repeatedly across the back of the legs, his teeth showing in a grimace. Angry marks appear on the tops of the thighs, under the thin shelf of his buttocks. A tag of paper falls half loose from the handle: the requisition form with the Master’s own conscientious, stubby pencil marks on it, flapping ludicrously. 

But it’s difficult leverage, even if the Master is strong. He stops as abruptly as he began. 

“What are ten or twenty thousand humans? Hold him,” he says, and Lucy Saxon does, shaking, her bare arms around his knees while he jabs the tip of the stick into the Doctor’s arsecrack and props the crosspiece against the conference speaker, balancing it with all the delicacy of a plate spinner.

There’s begging after this, too, a lot of it, a white noise of helpless, desperate pleading, the Toclafane relaying a visual feed while the Master lolls in his chaise lounge chair, hardly even watching. 

Sometime that afternoon, the tape runs out and another one goes in. Time passes: the light, deep now, too warm, exits to the west, and so this must happen more than once. 

By the time the Master dismisses them all for the evening, the barbarous rod has slipped and fallen clattering from its precarious balance and he seems to have forgotten about it. 

“Someone cover him up,” he says, and produces an unlikely green handful from his pocket. A guard, the tallest of them, moves forward, hesitates, takes the stuff from him. He climbs up to tie the twine around the narrow hips. He looks at the Master, who is watching, and so he arranges everything diligently. So it’s sculpture after all, and not paint. Old Masters, not Haystacks. Only the light isn’t right for either anymore. The Master gets up and wanders away. 

That night, the cameraman spends hours in the editing room. Every time a tape runs to the end he rewinds it and hits play and then he blinks and it’s at the end again. 

It’s a two-night job regardless; somehow, the Master doesn’t get angry. Day two sees the shackles empty below the girders, the tabletop smudged and scuffed, the line of sight between the stairs and the ceiling strangely vacant, light, in the sense of weightlessness. There’s a tape still in the camera. When he puts it into the player, later, he realises he’d left the equipment running with the fresh tape in it while they’d all gone in and out of shot, cleaning up. The room had dimmed on a picture of slack feet. 

Maybe it’s because he is good at his job that he reviews this unintended recording. The cameraman fast-forwards through the rest of the footage, skimming while he pulls up the work he’d tried to do the night before. He’s dreading what he’ll see; it’ll be a mess and he’ll have to fix it, and he knows he _can_ —he knows it could be quite good—and his eyes keep skittering from it to the dark quiet on the other tape. 

Almost always, the feet are so still only the blinking in and out of a display panel’s status indicator proves the camera’s really working. Then they jerk violently, a hurried freeze frame showing severe arches and extreme, ridged tendons, a kick, a whole-body convulsion...then nothing again for a time. Once, there’s a long, loud cry, grieving and frustrated and secret. 

But near the end of the tape, the theatre accents flood on in the alcoves, filling the screen with artificial light, making the shadowed visible. The cameraman gives up pretending not to watch. Isn’t this what they’ve been waiting for, he and the Doctor and the empty room?

“Long enough, I think,” the Master says, off camera, very close to the microphone. His voice is calm now, intimate. 

The winch makes a terrific noise as it releases chain, the grind and whine of some industrial, cement-block operation, dark lubricant showing on the descending links. The Doctor’s toes meet glass. His legs offer no resistance as the Master continues to let him down. His knees don’t so much buckle as fold, lightly, limp. 

“Can’t even hold yourself up,” the Master tsks. “Does someone have to help you with everything?”

The engine halts, reverses, takes up enough slack to pull the Doctor upright. If he would only try he might be able to take the weight off his arms, off his wrists. 

Then the Master is in the picture with him. He’s still mostly dressed in the day’s dark suit, only the jacket missing or shrugged off somewhere the camera doesn’t see. He pushes up onto the table behind the Doctor. The effortlessness of the motion is a jibe at the Doctor’s debility or passivity. 

The Master approaches him, languid. He slots the links out of his cuffs and tosses them aside with a flick; they clunk on hardwood like heavy dice, tumbling only once. He throws his tie over his shoulder. He folds his sleeves past his wrists with a slowness that is not quite methodical. The Doctor shudders suddenly, his ribs jumping. Rewinding to see why isn’t really necessary, but...the Master lays his hand on the Doctor’s side. That’s all. His fingers press, maybe, into the concave softness below the last rib. 

He traces the ribs with his thumb. “All alone now,” he says, “no one watching.”

He sticks his fingers under the coarse string; it snaps in one sharp jerk. A line of white appears on the Doctor’s skin, then fades. The Master puts the fig leaf in the Doctor’s mouth. “Hold that—” and he does “—spread. Spread! Stand on your feet like a functional person.”

He kicks at the Doctor’s feet, and finally, the Doctor seems to remember how to use them. Wide, his legs only maintain a precarious balance, perched on his toes. The Master adjusts the stance. He manipulates the controls on the box hanging on its thick cable from the ceiling until the height of the Doctor is just right. He wraps his arm around the Doctor’s waist. His other hand drops over the hip, to his crotch. 

He kneads the Doctor’s penis, rolls the head unkindly between thumb and fingers. 

“Touch me, you begged. I’m touching you. What _will_ you do for me?”

But before there’s an answer, or as answer, the Doctor’s getting hard, long and slim in the Master’s blunt hand. The Master squeezes a tear out of the tip.

“Now you’re erect,” he says, “but much too late. _So_ many people you could have saved and didn’t.”

The Doctor spits out the leaf. “You didn't have to kill them.”

“No,” the Master agrees happily, stroking. “But what an opportunity to be their saviour!”

“I’m not their saviour.”

“You’re their destroyer. Just as you were ours.” 

He pinches and pulls on a fold of skin. Nothing he does, nothing he says deters the Doctor’s body. He stretches the Doctor’s scrotum. He chokes the Doctor’s dick. He runs a finger around the ridged ring of pumped-up flesh where it changes abruptly from matte to shiny. The Doctor’s making faces, reacting silently in the only way the Master can’t fully see. 

He rubs against the Master, twisting to and fro to push his arse around on him. Immediately, the Master withdraws, his hands leaving the Doctor’s skin. 

“What are you doing?”

The Doctor looks flabbergasted. “I’m...participating.”

“You mean it wasn’t all just a distasteful lie to spare a lot of lives, Doctor? You should know it wasn’t very convincing.”

A pause. The thing that flits across the Doctor’s face, replacing the howling betrayal of only a moment before, might be determination. 

“I know I can’t help the humans.”

“Good.”

“If there’s anyone I can save, if there's _only_ one I can save, it’s you. That’s what this is. That’s what I’m doing.”

The Master grits his teeth. “I’m going to put my cock in your arse, and what I think you should _do_ is make me something to ease my way.” 

He unzips his fly, the sound lurid in the nighttime silence. “You’re useless at much of anything, but I think you’ll excel at that.”

And he’s right. The Doctor hasn’t been hard for long, but the Master barely has to pump him, his mouth pressed into the Doctor’s ear, murmuring viciously, before the Doctor’s face changes, chagrined, and he’s spurting into the Master’s cupped palm. 

The Master evaluates it. “Is that all? Well, it’s up to you.”

He moves away from the Doctor to smear the palmful over his own penis. What’s left, he applies to the Doctor’s arse, cleaning a butter knife, a bricklayer with an excess of mortar. 

“Brace yourself.” The Doctor goes rigid all over. His knees lock. Legs and arms, neck and core tighten. The Master positions, aims, pushes incrementally into him, holding him by the hips, his fingers digging into bone handles. 

The Doctor’s mouth opens. 

The Master rocks; each time he pushes forward he’s a little closer to the Doctor, each time the Doctor’s eyes are wider, darker, wetter. The Doctor’s hands close around the chains; he forces his own feet flat the better to lean back into the Master, angling, a searching concentration in his face. By the time the Master stops still, black trousers kissing freckled skin, the Doctor’s half-slack penis is hardening again, and both their chests are heaving.

“This is disrespectful,” the Master stage whispers, grinning. “You’re monstrous. What is it like? I want to feel it, I want to know it, I want to see. Give it to me.”

He wraps his hands around the Doctor’s. He bites into the Doctor’s arm. They seem to spasm together, and then the Master is thrusting hurriedly—

“Take it, take it! Take it, take it, take it,” and it’s the Doctor, not the Master who is shouting it, the words nonsensical, but then, when is sex a time of intelligible words? What about any of this makes any sense, the stuff on the tape, the grotesque pageant of the previous day, the incomprehensible unreality of this entire year: the farce in the Master’s methods and the end of humanity, which should be impossible...

Dawn is coming again to the Valiant. In the video, the night’s dim spotlights pale and disappear as the intimate dark gives way—the suspended dark, the quiescent, sleepless, hiding dark—to the physical persistence of the planet and its blind movements. It spins, still; it falls and falls towards its sun, turning endlessly from it as it tries to break away; the chariot of day draws its burden without mind and without minding what is happening on the surface, what is happening in its sky.

What he sees is in the past already, anyway. It’s been turned over, archived, averaged out by the facing into sun. He was there. He collected the tape and put it in the player. The cameraman isn’t closely guarded. He could walk outside up onto the flight deck as the third morning breaks, he could continue to its eastern edge. He’d be useless to the Master then. He would leave the last project unfinished. 

The tool will lay itself down. This instrument has done with its work. 

There’s a splatter onto the glass. The Doctor isn’t so human now, his dick jumping, getting off again, naked and elsewhere, _profuse_ , and that elsewhere has the Master in it, and the lavishness with which he’s letting the Master use him has nothing to do with the Earth. These aliens rattle the table and the oily chains and mark them, and the black shoes squeal against the table’s top. The Master’s holding the Doctor close, both arms around his torso as the Doctor jerks and jerks. When the droplets empty to nothing, he lets him go, a hand pinching his own cock and another reaching for the big-buttoned control on its dangling cable, and drops him, played-out, onto his front. 

He’s a spent pile, legs folded, chest and face down in it, spine visible past the frame of his finally relieved arms. 

The brute hand closes in his hair. The head’s pulled up, pried back for the answering splatter. A shake, like the last moments at the urinal. Zipping up. The shoes and the dark legs leave the frame. The table shakes and the floor thumps softly. 

The brightening quiet. Day soon.

“Don’t leave me here. Please.”

The tape runs out.


End file.
